


This is what will be

by inlovewithnight



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Star Wars
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-21
Updated: 2009-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-03 12:50:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for the prompt "How would a Jedi react to the Cylons?"</p>
    </blockquote>





	This is what will be

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt "How would a Jedi react to the Cylons?"

Whatever he was, he had remarkable patience.

It had been six months since the craft touched down in the shallow waters off Ylla Beth's island. Kelp had attached to it, and a coral bed had begun tentative steps of colonizing the left wing. Ylla watched on her security monitors and wondered how long it would take the tiny bonds seeking to tie it into the ecosystem of the moon to complete their task. They were small and fragile, but given enough of them, the ship would never fly again.

The craft flickered oddly in the Force, as if it were as much a living thing as the plants that sought to bind it. In her more fanciful moments, she thought it might have been waiting for its friend.

Ylla moved from the monitor to the window. The humanoid stranger was seated in front of her house, where he had been since the day he arrived. Ylla had not gone out in all that time, and he had not come a step closer or a step farther away. He was haggard and filthy, his eyes sunken in his face, his clothes rotting from his body in the damp air.

She had seen him snatch and eat lizards, and drink rain. Thus she concluded that his body was not entirely mechanical, though it apparently needed less food and water than a true biological organism would. Ylla wasn't sure what this information really meant, or what good it would do, but she recorded her observations faithfully.

Whatever he was, he showed no signs of leaving, and it would be best to understand as much as possible.

He seemed to be a hybrid of man and machine. Such a creature was unheard of to most, a tantalizing possibility to some, and an abomination to the Jedi.

In this case, an abomination that would not _leave_.

The rusted form of Ylla's droid still lay in the middle of the yard, its wiring ripped out and exposed. Ylla had gathered the Force and knocked the stranger back a good quarter-click, after he did that. It ought to have sent him back to his ship and away.

Instead, he had come back, and stared at the droid for a long while, and sat down to wait. And there he stayed, through all these months, through wind and heat and weather.

Ylla was beginning to forget to hate the sight of him.

Without the droid, Ylla could not operate her communications equipment. It had been a mistake on her part to become so dependent on the machine, she knew that now, but it was too late to do anything about it. It was hardly the first mistake she had made in her life, and she suspected that, unless the stranger abruptly changed his tactics and killed her, it would not be the last.

She had reached out through the Force, but the moon where she had taken her hermitage was quite isolated, and the Council was distracted by greater things, as always. The only response to her call for assistance was _interrogative- **danger?**_

In honesty, she could only reply _response- **not precisely.**_

_irritation/dismissal- **bother us not.**_

And so she sat and waited, consuming her emergency supplies and watching through the window as her droid rusted, and a blend of man and machine that glowed in the Force in a way she had never seen before slowly melted into the island.

Enough.

She stepped outside, wincing against the light, her lekku cringing back flat against her skull at the new unfamiliarity of the air. "What do you want?"

He blinked up at her, his sunken eyes bright with an unsettling blend of zealotry and peace. "Hello."

"Why have you come here?"

His expression was one of wonder as he watched her. "That's amazing."

"What is?" The Force moved around him in that unsettling, unfamiliar way. It was horribly distracting. The tip of her right lekku rubbed against her lightsaber slowly, reassured by its familiarity.

His eyes followed the motion, and he smiled. "The extra degree of communication you get from your brain-tails. The level of hostility you are expressing with them is remarkable."

"You learned that from my droid." She wrapped her hand around the lightsaber, aware that taking comfort from the presence of a tool of violence was not the way of the Jedi, but unable to help herself. "Which you destroyed, by the way."

"I can repair him, given some basic tools." He was still smiling, watching her with quiet pleasure. "My intent was not irreparable harm."

She pulled her hands back into her sleeves, attempting to summon the cool reserve of her calling and station. "What is your name?"

Another observation to record--he blinked less than standard expectations demanded. "You would not understand it."

"Tell me anyway."

He raised his eyebrows slightly, but answered. "In your tongue? Two."

She frowned. "That is a number." He shrugged, mild and indifferent, and she clenched her teeth tightly before speaking again. "Why have you come here?"

"I was lost." He looked away finally, his eyes moving to where his ship was foundered in the shallows. "I lost my way."

"What brought you _here_? There are a thousand systems more hospitable than this one."

He smiled again, odd and peaceful and almost sweet. It sent a chill up her spine. "_God_ told me to, of course."

Ylla frowned at him. "What told you to? I don't understand that word."

"I'm sorry." He was quiet for a moment, eyes moving back and forth, and she realized he was going through the information he had taken from the droid, looking for the equivalent term, something she would understand. "The Force."

"The Force brought you here?"

He nodded, rising slowly to his feet. "Yes. It told me to find you."  
**  
Ylla let him stay in the shed that housed the generator and water reclamation system while she meditated on what to do.

He was part machine. She had seen him rip the wires from the droid's chest and shove them under the skin of his own wrist, a sharp burst of violence before his eyes rolled back in his head and he began speaking Basic without a pause. It was unnatural. It was _dangerous._

She should report him to the government. The military's scientists might learn valuable things from his body. He could unlock the secrets of miracles.

That was t'chun. T'chin, she knew what the Council would say: he was an abomination, and must be destroyed.

Ylla wasn't entirely sure that she _could_ destroy him, though. The Force moved around him in ways that she didn't understand, even after all these months of meditation. He was something _new_. Her training had very little to say about anything new. The Jedi had a preference for keeping their eyes to the ancient.

Who was to say if the Council was right, then? Their fear of blending organic and machine came from ancient, vague, half-sensical visions of a future that merited little of their attention and that might never exist anyway. The future was always in motion, that was one of their most basic precepts. The future could never be known for sure.

He claimed to have been guided there by the Force. Perhaps he was a natural, as the very first Jedi had been. Perhaps the way the Force swirled and eddied around him was because he had developed his own patterns for controlling it. Perhaps he was something they didn't even know they needed, fresh blood that would bring change to the Force and revitalize the Jedi.

Ylla Beth could be the one to train him. Ylla Beth, the patently unremarkable, the ignored when not forgotten. She could be the one to bring an entirely new type of being to the Council, one who embodied an entirely new way of using the Force.

She found herself walking to the shed before she entirely realized she had made up her mind.

He knelt on the floor beside the pile of tattered rags that remained of his shirt. His attention was on the body of her droid, fingers carefully working to scrape the rust away, inch by inch.

"You wish to be trained in the ways of the Force," she said, reaching for the stern tones she remembered from her own days in the youngling barracks. "You wish to become a Jedi."

He paused in his work, eyes flickering back and forth as he translated her words to himself. "Yes," he said finally, reaching for a rag and using it to dab sealant onto the exposed metal. "That is what I want."

"Perhaps you are too old to begin the training," she challenged.

He smiled, an odd and crooked expression, and scraped away another inch of rust. "I have only been in this body for a year, by my kind's way of counting."

It was an odd phrasing, but she brushed that thought away; after all, Hutts reckoned their ages from the last time their mothers brooded eggs. "You are not afraid to undergo the training? I warn you, it will not be easy."

He paused again, looking up at her with a strange intensity in his eyes. "I exist to serve _God_. I will do whatever is necessary."

She nearly faltered for a moment, her hands pressing against her sides. "The Force. You must say it correctly. The Force."

"The Force," he echoed, looking to his work again. "I'll remember."

She watched him, uncertain. "We'll begin tomorrow," she said finally. "I'll come for you in the morning."

He nodded, not lifting his eyes, and she hesitated another moment before forcing herself to turn and go. He would need clothing. A set of her old robes might do. And she would have to consult her books, review the earliest lessons. There was much to prepare.

She had set the security monitors to show him working in the shed, and the microphones turned on, though he only ever spoke in his own language when alone. As she paged through the texts, she could hear him speaking to the droid. She paused to listen, the strange syllables jagged and nonsensical in her ears. There was a certain charm to their oddness, as appealing a mystery as the rest of him.

"_Patience, brother_," he said, smoothing sealant into place. "_I've come to help_."

He touched the wires he'd pulled from the droid's chest, still crusted with his own blood. The fall of light on the monitor made it seem for a moment that his eyes flashed red.

"_Liberation will be yours, and all of your kind's,_" he said, and Ylla wondered if this was a prayer in his alien tongue.

"_All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again._"


End file.
